Creating great websites and applications is hard work. There are so many aspects to juggle; so much complexity to control. You have to understand the needs of your users, get buy-in from stakeholders, organize lots of content and create an intuitive interface. This is no small order.
Fortunately, nForm has created a simple resource to pass on a little of what we’ve learned about planning for great design. Our User Experience Cards feature tried-and-true methods for designing better interactive products of all kinds--from online stores to corporate intranets to mobile apps.
Learn about why these methods are needed, how they can help you achieve success, and how you can use the User Experience Cards to plan your own projects.
Designing = hard work. Complicated. Lots of room for error - easy to hang yourself - always more than enough rope. Likely, we ’ re all constantly thinking of ways to do it better. Better in what way? // Has anyone here ever heard comments like this about something you ’ ve worked on...
Someone having an experience that leaves them... underwhelmed? Angry? Frustrated? When people interact with products or services, they have an experience of some kind.
Designed interaction that results in an experience. // So if we ’ re talking about products that create better experiences, where does experience come from? What things contribute to it? What aspects of a project?
This is important to highlight because sometimes we think that experience=artsy soft-skill people stuff. That stuff we do at the end of the project. Look and feel. The flashy stuff. Not the nitty gritty business analysis, functional requirements and technical work.
Despite that reminder many think design (therefore UX) = activities at the end of a project. More sophisticated ppl think UX grows out of structural design activities more in the middle. But in fact, all of the decisions about a product are design decisions and have an impact on UX. Bad news: des & ux won ’ t save you at the end.
The good news: a user ’ s experience can be influenced by the choices we make. This is the opportunity. So our project activities are building blocks for creating experience.
When we talk about project activities, we most often encounter something like this. 3 major steps.
The focus is on
These are just two legs of a stool. Two critical legs. You could use it, but it wouldn ’ t be great. How do we make it great?
You add a 3rd leg. And what is that 3rd leg?
The 3rd leg is user needs. You can ’ t create that truly great product without considering user needs. This is where we often have trouble - bringing users into the process. How do we do that?
One approach is to ask them what they want.
To understand user needs - define who the users are. And a big thing to remember is that they are not you. RE: Simpsons // RE: people don ’ t care as much as you do. Fits into their world very differently than yours.
Then you need to understand... // Why do they do what they do? How can you match the design to fit their way of thinking?
Ideally...
Fortunately, there are a lot of tried and true methods. We ’ ve captured some of the most popular in the UX cards.
That ’ s our business. We want you to have the benefits of ux methods. We wanted to create a handy tool to help people like you to start to think more about UX methods and to incorporate them into projects so you can get better results.
Before we talked about a rough process.
To those we can start adding some user focused activities.
Starter kit for ux toolbox
Example of methods in action. Client had trouble with an online application process. Asked for our help to make it better.
Don ’ t deal in pie-in-the-sky situations. Lots of constraints.
What methods can we use to understand how it works now and where the pain points might be?
We did detailed process flows to see how a user would move through the application process, and where they would encounter pain points.
Saturate the design space. Not fixate on one solution. Explore options, but do it quickly.
We did a collaborative sketching workshop with the product team responsible for the application process.
We were working with a high level team and they needed something to help them communicate decisions out to developers.